William Randolph Hearst's Plumbing

William Randolph Hearst
was a leading American newspaper publisher, starting with
The San Francisco Examiner in 1887.
He went on to acquire a large chain of newspapers,
including almost 30 newspapers in major American cities.
He later expanded his publishing empire to include
magazines, creating the largest newpaper and magazine
publishing company in the world.

Teddy Roosevelt wanted a war, and Hearst's newspapers
gave it to him by driving public opinion toward the war
with Spain in 1898.
You might want to also browse the
Toilets of World Leaders.
Hearst was very influential in domestic politics and,
at least in the case of the Spanish-American War, geopolitics,
but he seemed to fit a little more obviously into
Arts & Letters
since his empire was based on publishing.

Hearst owned an estate on a large hill above San Simeon
on the coast of California between Los Angeles and
San Francisco.
He formally named the estate La Cuesta Encantada
or The Enchanted Hill,
but he usually referred to it simply as "The Ranch".

San Simeon was then a rather remote location a significant
traveling distance north of Los Angeles, and an even longer
journey from San Francisco.
The completion of California Highway 1,
the Pacific Coast Highway, made San Simeon much
more accessible.

The complex of structures commonly called Hearst Castle
was designed and repeatedly re-designed and constructed over
the period from 1919 through 1947.

The Neptune Pool, seen here, was rebuilt three times,
changing with Hearst's tastes and the architect's plans.
It was started in 1924, and finally reached its final
form as seen here in 1936.

The Neptune Pool
is based around the façade of an ancient Roman temple.
Hearst purchased the temple in Italy.
He had it disassembled, transported from Italy to California,
and reassembled on his estate.
It is surrounded by Roman style columns and statuary.

Water for the estate was supplied through
a gravity-based system.
This system collected water from artesian wells on
Pine Mountain, an 1100 meter peak 11 kilometers to the east
of the castle complex.
The water was piped to a reservoir on Rocky Butte, a
610 meter hill a little over a kilometer southeast
of the castle.
From there, it was piped to the estate to supply the pools,
the bathrooms, and irrigation for the extensive gardens
and orchards.

Hearst's architect, really his collaborator on the
project over the nearly 30 years of primary construction
and modification, was Julia Morgan.

Morgan was a graduate of the Civil Engineering program at the
University of California, Berkeley.
She was the first woman to graduate from the
École National Supérieure des Beaux-Arts
in Paris.

The structure's exterior design and decoration is taken from
a wide mixture of historic European styles.
However, the underlying structure is mostly
steel-reinforced concrete.
It has weathered numerous earthquakes, some of them quite
strong, with minimal damage.

In Hearst's time, there was no electrical service in the area.
The estate had its own power plant.

The main building in the Hearst Castle complex has a
façade patterned after a specific Spanish cathedral.
A set of "guest cottages", each of them a fairly large
structure, surrounds the main structure.

The resulting complex includes 56 bedrooms and
61 bathrooms.
Some of the bathrooms from the guest cottages are seen below.

The elite of the political and entertainment worlds hoped
for invitations to the castle.
Winston Churchill and U.S. Presidents Calvin Coolidge and
Franklin Roosevelt were among Hearst's guests, along with
Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Jimmy Stewart,
Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Bob Hope,
and many others.

Where next?

Yes, Orson Welle's movie
Citizen Kane
is based on Hearst.
The cinematography and sound were revolutionary.
The story, however, at least to me, can be summarized
as "Sometimes bad things happen to unpleasant people."
And it's not very logical.

The movie opens as Kane,
the fabulously wealthy owner of a media empire,
dies alone.
The course of the movie follows a journalist
(we never see his full face),
investigating the meaning of Kane's final word,
"Rosebud".

So here's a question:
Since Kane died alone, how did anyone know what he said?

My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001,
although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous
Toilet of the World page until
January 17, 2002.
Some time soon after that I split it into categories,
and the collection has grown ever since.

In December, 2010 I registered the
toilet-guru.com
domain and moved the pages to a dedicated server.